Forget reality TV. In Korea, online gaming is it

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

Keun Bae’s wife, Heejung, was worried. At midnight, her husband got a call that roused him from sleep. Keun Bae had stepped into the hallway and closed the bedroom door behind him, but she still heard him speaking angrily into his cell phone: "Sell. Do as I say. Sell."

Heejung fretted for the next couple of days, and finally broke down. "What was that call all about?" she asked tearfully. "Are you in trouble?"

Keun Bae assured his wife that he wasn’t about to lose his shirt on the stock market. Although Keun Bae is an average guy — 32, father of two, Internet café worker — he’s also a high-ranking feudal lord in “Lineage,”  a massively multiplayer online game. And when you’re a high-ranking feudal lord, you’ve got to expect the occasional late-night phone call.

Online gaming is to South Korea what reality TV is to the United States: Huge. Really huge. An estimated 17 million people in the country of 48 million play games regularly. Consoles, so popular in the United States and Japan, have barely made the radar in South Korea. There, online gaming is it.

Hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, the South Korean government invested much of its IMF bailout package on building a national broadband network. These are no ordinary pipes: Korean’s wires can transfer data at speeds of up to 50 megabits per second (Mbps). The “elite” package from AT&T Yahoo! promises download speeds up to 6.0 Mbps.

The investment paid off. Close to 70 percent of South Korean households have broadband. And the “fat pipes” mean that it’s easier for these households to access media-rich content like games and video-on-demand, says Allison Luong, principal and managing director of San Francisco’s Pearl Research.

As such, young people in the technology-obsessed culture have grown up online — but not in the same way that the MySpacers have here in the United States. In South Korea, the home PC is as ubiquitous as a refrigerator.

South Korea also has a consumer culture that rivals the United States and Japan. And keeping up with new trends and technology is considered important to social status.

“If you want to move up, you have to have access to the Internet and a PC,” says Luong. “And that means to access online games.”

And there’s no place more popular to access online games than the Internet cafés. Called PC bangs, some of these joints are swanky hotspots with fancy drinks. Some are just smoke-filled urban dives. But there are approximately 28,000 of them in South Korea. They’re everywhere. Think Starbucks. Think Wal-Mart.

The term “online gamer” may conjure up images of a lone teenager playing “EverQuest” in his parents’ basement, but that’s not how it goes in South Korea. Group interaction is as strong a cultural more in that country as studying and shopping. Young people go to the PC bangs to blow off steam and to hang out.

“Community within games is really popular, as well as the ability to form groups, or guilds,” says Luong. “These social aspects are a big reason why people keep playing games [in South Korea.]”

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